Saturday, 7 January 2012

Developing a qualitative research coding index for first-year, university students' ICT practices

This post was written for researchers interested in the background to the fourth phase of the ICT Access and Use qualitative research project's coding process.

The fourth phase of the IDRC-funded Centre for Educational Technology's ICT Access and Use project uses digital ethnographies to understand how twenty six, first-year students at four South African Universities used Information Communication Technology (ICT) for study and leisure purposes last year.

This research phase saw four researchers at the universities of Cape Town, Rhodes, Orange Free State and Fort Hare prepare eight sets data:

A series of interview videos between the university's researcher and his or her subjects;

Videos of focus groups;

Videos of ICT use at home;

Videos of formal and informal mobile phone video use;

Videos of social media and internet use;

Videos University software use (such as learning management systems)

Screengrabs of Facebook use;

and documents of the researchers' reflections.

NVivo 9 software has been used to import these media files for coding and qualitative analysis. However, before either of these could start, Cheryl Brown, Laura Czerniewicz, Kelsey Wiens and I worked at preparing classifications and a coding index that could be queried for most of the project's research questions, whilst being robust enough to answer any new questions that might arise.

Preparing this coding followed these eight steps:

1 Kelsey and I reviewed the project's documents and transcribed key points from student interviews;

2 I illustrated these points on two large cyan posters with yellow stickies (these were very useful for re-grouping concepts on the board);

ICT Access and Use phase four coding poster (9 January, 2012).

3 These points were reviewed internally and presented externally to the universities' researchers and their most engaged students;

4 Kelsey and I separated the points that were to be used for classification or coding;

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